ERAMITHE: Yesterday afternoon [Monday, May 24] around 3 o’clock, we were in the camp [on Place Pétion in the Champ-de-Mars], where we were having a meeting, when we heard a bunch of commotion. People told someone was attacking cars outside, they were throwing rocks. So what were we going to do, all of us women in the meeting? They told us, “Don’t go out yet. Wait a while.” After a while, once the tension seemed to have quieted down a bit, the women went out. While they went out, myself and my colleague Malya went into the tent, and only when we were inside did we hear something being fired into the camp. It sounded like they were firing a canon. They were firing, “GOU! GOU!” From what we were hearing, for all we knew, they were firing bullets, so we lay down on the ground. We made all the children lie down, we told them, “Get down, get down!” Then someone said, “Those are bullets, that’s tear gas.” So then we thought, “Well, if it’s just gas, then we can still stay here.” So we stayed, and while we waited [the gas] continued and continued. We have a committee in the camp, we’ve created a security committee, and they came to were we were and said “Don’t stay here, don’t stay here! You have to get out of here! MINUSTAH is throwing gas, people are breathing in the gas, children are breathing in the gas, you have to get out of the camp.” But we said, “We’ll just wait a little while, we’ll keep watching.” So we left our own tent and we went to another tent, where we all stayed together. While we were staying together, under the tent, they kept throwing lots of gas. Then we heard one fall directly on our tent. Then, from where it fell, there was a noise like a light rain, but coming through a filter. Then the children started to choke, they were choking. People told us to rub lemon on their faces, all these different things for the children who were choking and screaming, and we tore the tent open to get out to where there wasn’t as much gas. When we got outside we found a machann and we bought two Cokes to pour over the children’s faces, because they say Coke is important for people who have breathed in gas. Then we moved on, we went to other people who had us go into another tent, but when we saw they were throwing gas everywhere, we started to run. They were throwing gas, we were running, until we got to the top of the Champ-de-Mars, near Digicel. After that, we learned that another woman who is a KOFAVIV member who I saw at the second tent we went into, that she was so affected by the gas she breathed in that they took her to l’Hopital General. And then this morning I learned about others they had to take to the hospital too. We had Melinda and two journalists who went to the hospital, and they heard that there were only five people taken to the hospital – two who were shot with rubber bullets and three who were strongly affected by the tear gas. There were two children, one who was hit in the face with a rubber bullet and another who was hit in the head. But ourselves we haven’t seen them yet, we haven’t seen those children. But there was one woman we saw who was running and saying that her baby died. But in the camp, all day you have to stay in your own space for the sake of keeping control, so we don’t know if that child died or not, because we can’t go out yet looking for information about what happened to that baby.

People were saying that Préval had said that the camp won’t be able to take the rains, that we should abandon it. We will have to leave it. Me, I wonder if this [attack] isn’t a strategy to make us leave the camp! Because I think if the students are protesting, they’re protesting in the Faculté d’Ethnologie [on the next corner down from the Place Pétion], you’ve got someone throwing rocks at MINUSTAH, there’s no reason to come into the camp where there are thousands and thousands of people – in Place Pétion alone we have 5500 people. A few people throw rocks at a MINUSTAH tank, a heavy-duty tank, and now because of that, that authorizes them to victimize everyone in the camp? To me, this seems like something we’ll never know the truth about. You have to ask yourself, “If this true, that what really happened was simply a confrontation between the students and MINUSTAH? Or is it not that they needed to evict the population of the camp, and Préval used this strategy to do it?” I saw something else, while we were running to get out of the camp, when we got to Avenue Mais right near the Ministère de la Condition Feminine, we saw a police car blocking the road so cars couldn’t go up or down the street, and it was MINUSTAH that was operating it. They were turning around to see the whole camp, they were turning and throwing gas.

I know every country has problems, but when they have these kinds of problems, children and women are protected. But in Haiti we don’t have that! In Haiti they treat everyone the same. There is no protection for anybody. I don’t know if they forget that it was women who brought them into this world, or that little children are just innocents. I don’t know what’s going through these people’s heads. They are heartless. You see the kinds of things people are doing under MINUSTAH. These were Brazilian MINUSTAH, it was a Brazilian tank that was firing gas at people, to make people evacuate, to remove people from the camps.

LAURA: So, you think that this might be the state’s strategy to make people leave the camps, and that the state is working together with MINUSTAH?

ERAMITHE: They work together, because, you know, MINUSTAH came to give support to this country. I believe they are supposedly here to protect people! But I don’t think that means firing into a camp, where there are thousands of people, firing until the little babies are breathing in gas, children are breathing in gas and have to be taken to the hospital! If you see someone who is throwing rocks in a student protest, you should look for a means to find and restrain that person. But you can’t turn thousands of people into victims on account of one individual! To me, it seems like a strategy, Préval’s strategy to make us leave the camps. They always say that the Champs de Mars camp is a camp they don’t know what to do with yet. That means that they’re looking for a way [to make us leave]. Today it’s gas, and that’s something that really makes us worry. You look and say, “Today they’re shooting tear gas at us, might it not be bullets tomorrow? Might it not be fire, as well?” Because if a single one of these tents catches fire, every last one going to catch fire, too. Like what happened in Ti Gwav – a thousand people, all their tents were burned, some people were injured, some died. You see?

LAURA: When did this happen in Ti Gwav?

ERAMITHE: I heard about it this morning. There was an agent who was telling me about it – last week, there was a fire, they say it was caused by a candle. But was it really a candle? All those tents, and it happened at sundown, as everyone was going to bed. That’s what makes us wonder, “If they are going to fire tear gas at us from 3 in the afternoon until 8 or 9 at night, is it going to be bullets or fire next?”

We’re asking ourselves what we’re going to do, because this catastrophe took place, people don’t have any possibility, any means, they have to live in the streets, whether they like it or not. Would you like to live like an animal? Living in the mud, you can’t live like that, you can’t live just any old way. People don’t have food to eat, they don’t have anything. Did people choose to be in this situation? How many times have we heard this is a natural disaster? We all survived it, we’re here! But now I think it’s the state’s responsibility to help people find permanent housing, somewhere for them to stay. You can’t just fire gas into the camp and expect people to leave it. They need to prepare somewhere else for us to go. We know the Champ de Mars is a touristic area, it’s supposed to be a place for tourists to come and visit. We know it’s not really a good place to have a tent city, but the questions we’re asking ourselves are, “Why has the government allowed this to go on so long? Why haven’t they prepared somewhere else for people to go? Why is this [attack] the strategy they’re using to get us out of the camp?”

LAURA: What would you like to happen to this tape, to the story you have just told me?

ERAMITHE: I’d like it to be publicized. Because we have to – if we keep quiet, it means people won’t know about it. It’s like they’ve started to say in the newspapers that this was a confrontation between MINUSTAH and the students, that they threw tear gas at the ethnology students. But really they were shooting gas into the camp. This means that they’ve started telling lies in the newspapers. Other people have to know about this, we have to publicize what happened, so that they stop telling these lies! Because MINUSTAH doesn’t have to right to shoot tear gas at people in the camps. If you see a student, a person that’s throwing rocks at a tank, you have a choice. You can’t just fire bullets or start a fire. If someone throws a rock , you should go after that person who threw a rock. But you can’t shoot tear gas at a whole population on account of a single individual who threw rocks at MINUSTAH. We can’t tolerate that. Within our organization, women who are in these camps who have already been victims, this makes me ask if this isn’t like when they rape women in the camps, because at the same time there are children as young as five who are victims, children who are 15 or 14 years old, people who are 60 years old are victims. Today it is gas they are shooting at us. We won’t tolerate it. If this continues, we are going to take to the streets to ask why Préval isn’t doing anything for the country.

LAURA: Who would you like to hear this message?

ERAMITHE: We’d like the people in the organizations, people in foreign governments, in international newspapers to hear it… Haitian newspapers, too, we don’t have a problem with their hearing it. Because they must hear it, they have to hear from the people who witnessed it, they must hear the people who lived through it, so they can know what happened and ask, “Is this right?” Should they deplore this? Should they denounce it? It’s not enough to just talk about it in the newspapers, like they did last night, when they said they didn’t attack anyone in the camps, they didn’t do anything to us, they didn’t fire tear gas at us. I’ve got some of the gas things that fell into our tent. We have the gas things.

LAURA: Canisters?

ERAMITHE: Yes. We went and found them, we found them all around our tent, the ones that fell into the camp.

LAURA: Who can change the situation in this country?

ERAMITHE: It is us, the people, and the government, because if we stay still and don’t talk, change will never come. For example, when you have a woman who is being victimized, and you don’t denounce it, you don’t say anything, things are just going to keep going and going and going the same way, and that woman is going to be victimized every day. We have to fight against the system, we have to fight against what’s happening in this country. All the time people are watching people be victims and living in poverty, You see this earthquake that struck the country, broke all the houses, now people don’t have anywhere to sleep, there has never been any construction. If we stay still we’ll never say anything. It is us, the people, the Haitian people, who can change our situation. Others can’t do anything for us. Well, yes, they can help us, but it is us who know what we want and need, and people should ask us what they can do for us [before they do it].

LAURA: Can you imagine a way for the foreigners who have come to rebuild the country to be able to hear what the people want?

ERAMITHE: Like, how they can use the aid that they’ve voted to send to us?

LAURA: Yes, but more like – how can people from other countries be able to hear the voice of the people, to use that information, for them to say “OK, this is what the people think we need to change the country.”

ERAMITHE: We need to find all those people who are protesting in the streets and making noise, because they aren’t talking about concrete things, things that could bring change to the country. We should sit and talk about concrete things, for example in a forum, where we can explain all of our problems [to the foreigners who come here]. For example sometimes we have people who come here and they tell us “we’ve come to give you phones. But it’s not your place to come and tell us you’re coming to give phones. It’s the people themselves who should be saying “Look, here’s what we want!” Maybe it’s not telephones that we need!

LAURA: Or basketball courts!

ERAMITHE: Right! It’s the people who can say what they want, who know what should be done. But whenever people come here with money, they announce, “This is how we’re going to use it.” If you come and do a project that people don’t need or want, then it’s like that money is completely lost. But if it’s the people themselves who say “This is what we want,” if you come and sit with people and they tell you want they need and want, I think that would be better than coming and imposing things on us. When they do that, it’ll be better.